Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

‘This is disco-wonderland!’ Gender,sexuality and the limits of gay domesticity on The Block

Gay men have been positioned as arbiters of ‘desirable’ domestic style—a domestic imaginary epitomised through their presence as designers and participants on lifestyle television. This paper offers a post-structural critique, examining how the intersections of gender and sexuality shape the contours of, and public responses to, gay domesticity. I scrutinise one telling example: commentaries on the domestic design created by a gay couple on The Block, an Australian lifestyle-reality programme. Applying discourse analysis to the public reception of their design, I argue the acceptability of gay domesticity is proscribed by norms of sexuality and gender, and consequently gay domesticity must be understood in both normatively feminine and masculine terms. While the desirability of gay domesticity reflects a feminisation of gay men, it is also constrained by processes of masculinisation that associate gay men's domestic tastes with Playboy-style bachelor domesticity. Through bachelor domesticity, tropes of partying and seduction undermine traditional feminine homemaking and the heteronormative ideology of home championing privatised nuclear family life. Scrutinising the intersections of gender and sexuality thus reveals limits to gay domesticity, with implications for the cultural politics around mainstream acceptance of gay masculinity: gay men and their homes are welcome when they reinforce heteronormative ideals.     

Gay-riatrics: spatial politics and activism of gay seniors in Tel-Aviv’s gay community centre

This paper discusses aspects of spatial politics and activism at the municipal Gay Community Centre in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one marginal group within the LGBT community that is active in the centre – gay seniors. Drawing on theories of queer geography, queer gerontology and geographies of activism and social movements, the qualitative research reported here uses in-depth interviews and participant observations to demonstrate how these men construct the space for their activity both inside and outside the centre. On the one hand, this spatial politics shifts along a delicate axis between proximity to the municipality and community hegemony, looking ‘inside’ the community on the one hand. On the other, it subverts and challenges the existing communal order, looking ‘outside’ to the surrounding society. However, these two directions are not necessarily binary; rather, as the paper shows, they stand in a dialectic that holds them in tension. This tension is evident in the ways in which the group operates from within the core of the hegemony, creating a complex non-dichotomous reality that enables politics that acts within – and despite – the mainstream.     

Sexual citizenship in Latvia: geographies of the Latvian closet

This study examines sexual citizenship in Latvia. It investigates the process by which political narratives have heterosexed the nation since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. My aim in exploring this process is to develop a deeper understanding of non-heteronormative identities and counter-hegemonic spaces in this heterosexist society. Drawing on discourse analysis of political media statements I argue that despite the legalizing of homosexuality, political narratives have continued to sex the nation as heterosexual, forging the national closet. I then explore how these narratives become experienced in lives of sexual minorities through the state's failure to prevent sexual discrimination. Drawing on participant observation and a decoding of the urban landscape, I investigate how the Latvian closet is materialized in the bodies and places of the everyday lives of ‘gay’ men living in the capital, Riga. Examined in this way insights are given to the spatial forms of political resistance to heterosexism in Latvia and how it differs from western models.     

Postfeminist possibilities: unpacking the paradoxical performances of heterosexualized femininity in club spaces

One of the ways in which the heterosexualization of women's bodies is made apparent is through the blatant promotion of Ladies' Night at night clubs. These are typically weekly events, of which women are granted complimentary entry by club operators. Ladies' Night is thus popularly construed as a time and space in which men can gain access to many ‘heterosexy’ female bodies. The deliberate deployment of specific kinds of (post)feminine bodies and subjectivities—slim, savvy, and sassy—in club promotional material is often couched in discourses that highlight female expression, consumption, and autonomy. Such a celebratory rhetoric of women as empowered actors seems to suggest that traditional gendered expectations of women as self-reserved, timid and vulnerable to sexual aggression are archaic and are no longer valid. In light of this, I investigate how women negotiate a postfeminist terrain within the context of Singapore's night clubbing scene. By employing qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnographic work, and discourse analysis, I argue that clubs are paradoxical spaces for performing gendered and (hetero)sexualized selves that vacillate between affirming and subverting heteropatriarchal regimes. In so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the scholarship on feminist geography by bringing recent debates on postfeminism into a productive conversation with the literature on (hetero)sexuality and space.     

Heritage Discourse and the Desexualisation of Public Space: The “Historical Restorations” of Bloomsbury's Squares

Abstract: In recent years, the local authorities in London's historic Bloomsbury district have carried out a number of refurbishments of the area's public squares. These landscaping schemes have typically been labelled “historical restorations” in attempts to predetermine the evaluation criteria as “historic” rather than political, social and aesthetic. Focusing on Russell Square and Bloomsbury Square, this paper illustrates how the “restorations” were selective: the introduction of gates and railings and the removal of planting were not primarily designed to restore these historical gardens, but reflect a surveillance‐friendly ideal of urban space, specifically introduced to displace the men who used these squares for cruising. Through a detailed review of archival material from both mainstream and gay media, I illustrate the shifting forms of policing and landscaping in Bloomsbury's squares, while also highlighting how homonormative capital has colluded with the regulation of public space in this part of London.     

Sex,drink, and state anxieties: governance through the gay bar

Gay bars have been central to the social and cultural geography of queer folk throughout the twentieth century. In North America, Liquor Control Boards have been important in governing homosexuality. In order to explore the spatial governance of homosexuals, this paper uses a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to analyze data from Washington State Liquor Control Board (WSLCB) enforcement and hearing files between 1934 and 1971. While the WSLCB governed heteronormatively, it did so with a relatively light touch through the deployment and selective enforcement of often vague administrative rules. Adherence to the rules, meanwhile, relied upon an ability and willingness to understand authorities’ intentions and imaginations and to self-govern accordingly. Gay bars were somewhat privileged vis-à-vis neighboring straight bars, due to the unintended consequences of certain state practices, a desire by state authorities to closet homosexuality generally, and a propensity for self-governance on the parts of gay bar owners, managers, and patrons. Our findings add nuance to work on Foucauldian studies in geography, work on licensing and regulation, and urban gay histories.     

‘Why can’t they meet in bars and clubs like normal people?’: the protective state and bioregulating gay public sex spaces

State regulation of gay public sex spaces (PSS) has prompted geographers to assess the influence that localised legalities exert in specific micro-spaces of interaction, and to expand this research into cities not considered to be archetypically ‘gay friendly’. Through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, it is important to consider state-directed bioregulatory influences upon toilets and parks as PSS. Such bioregulation, with its aim of producing a ‘healthy’ sexual population, seeks to expose public sex as ‘dangerous’, encouraging a policing of PSS and the men who use them. Part of this bioregulation also enlists men using PSS as responsible for peer surveillance to ensure anonymity and privacy in PSS. This auto-surveillance develops a ‘common code of conduct’ leading these men to develop their own modes of ‘normativity’ within these hetero-challenging spaces. By consulting with men who use PSS, I unearth oral histories of how changing laws, policy and ‘mainstream’ attitudes towards PSS in Glasgow, Scotland, have impacted upon cruising and cottaging. This paper will provide a place-specific reading of gay urban sexscapes, exploring how state bioregulation encourages the creation of new gay practices, identities and geographies.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

Imagining Icarus: Edward Field,Manhood and Authenticity in Post-war America1

While the Second World War had profound effects on the way that American men conceived of themselves, for two groups - Jewish men and men who would later identify as gay - the war held a special resonance. Deborah Dash Moore has demonstrated that the Second World War allowed Jewish men to cast off stereotypes and be accepted into the larger American polity, while Alan Berube has written about the ways in which the Second World War created a space where gay men were able to understand themselves as part of a larger community. Historians have looked at the ways service affected these men during the war, however more work needs to be done understanding how these experiences affected men after the war. By examining the life of Edward Field, a Jewish and gay veteran who became a prominent poet in post-war America, we can understand how experiences of wartime allowed men like Field to construct an alternative idea of masculinity, one based on male camaraderie and emotional authenticity. Edward Field's wartime and post-war experiences suggest that Jewish and gay identities could intersect in ways that were mutually reinforcing and highlight the complicated nature of the Second World War experience.     

The female body as the bearer of national identity in Iran: a critical discourse analysis of the representation of women's bodies in official online outlets

Abstract

The female body has been in the foreground of nation-building in Iran especially since the 1930s projects of modernization, when unveiling women and adaptation to Western clothing became a crucial factor of bolstering modern Iranian national identity as opposed to a religion-based national identity. After the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic dress code became compulsory and female imagery depicting modesty and piety became a source of national identity. Although the representation of women's bodies in nationalist discourses has been subject of different studies, women's representation in official online outlets is still understudied. This article discusses how women's bodily appearance and representation in official online outlets feed into the nationalist discourses in Iran. Three key cases between 2014 and 2017 are addressed: (i) actress Leila Hatami kissing a man at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival; (ii) the public debate on women's entrance to sports stadiums in 2014–2015; (iii) the public revelation of actress Taraneh Alidoosti's tattooed forearm in 2016. Data were collected from multiple Iranian official online platforms and a critical discourse analysis was undertaken to analyse different forms of discursive articulation regarding women's bodies and national identity. Drawing on feminist literature inspired by the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, the article discusses the ways in which women's bodies are discursively constructed to illustrate a uniform Islamic nationalistic discourse.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies

This article introduces the possibilities of a new term, ‘genderism’, to describe the hostile readings of, and reactions to, gender ambiguous bodies. Genderism is used here to articulate instances of discrimination that are based on the discontinuities between the sex with which an individual identifies and how others, in a variety of spaces, read their sex. The article suggests that intersections between queer theories, that destabilise the dichotomy of man/woman, and performative geographies, that recognise the (re)formation of space, could facilitate, and indeed necessitate, a consideration of how the illusion of dichotomous sexes is (re)formed at the site of the body (re)constituting men and women in context. Nine women, who participated in a wider research project about non‐heterosexual women's lives, spoke of being mistaken for men yet understanding themselves and living as women. Using these narratives the ‘bathroom problem’, where women are read as men in toilets and as a result subjected to abusive and even violent reactions, is examined. These policing behaviours demonstrate the instability of sexed norms as well as how sites can be (re)made ‘woman only’ and simultaneously ‘women's’ bodies (re)produced. The article then examines how women negotiate the policing of sexed spaces such that bodies, sexed sites (toilets) and the location of these sites (nightclubs, service stations) are mutually constituted within sexed regimes of power. In this way the article aims to explore how sexed power relations (re)form the mundane ‘stuff’ of everyday life by examining moments where boundaries of gender difference are overtly (en)forced.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.     

Multiple Suburban Publics: Rethinking Community Opposition to Consolidation in Sydney

Since the late 1980s urban consolidation has become the dominant strategic planning paradigm across Australian cities; however, sites of densification are increasingly becoming sites of community resistance and conflict. In the context of the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy, this paper explores Ku‐ring‐gai in Sydney's northern suburbs as a site of community resistance centred on opposition to urban consolidation. Moving beyond more traditional constructions of community resistance as a form of NIMBYism, we present here a typology of community resistance groups and explore the complex relationships between these groups, which are used to challenge development. In addition we draw on understanding of urban publics to explore the ways in which these groups attempt to engage and act on behalf of a diverse set of publics operating across scales.     

'Selling the rain', resisting the sale: Resistant identities and the conflict over tourism in Goa

This paper discusses the development of Goa as a tourist site within India and examines the economic, cultural and environmental impacts of such tourism development upon Goan communities. In so doing, the paper argues that while Goa has become a dispensable space for the exigencies of contemporary tourist development it has also engendered various forms of resistance to this process. The paper utilizes Manuel Castells' notion of 'resistance identity' and David Harvey's notion of 'militant particularism' to interpret some of these resistances. In Goa, these have taken the form of 'active minorities' whose most immediate source of self-recognition and autonomous organization is their locality: resistance is practised, at least in part, as a defensive articulation of identity to protect collective resources.     

Talking about bodies online: Viagra,YouTube, and the politics of public(ized) sexualities

The development of Viagra in the late 1990s ushered in a new age of conversation about sex and sexuality, as men's bodily abilities were put on display for all to discuss. In 2005, the video-sharing technology YouTube was launched. Taken together, these technological innovations – both biomedical and representational – have produced debate around sex, sexualized and gendered bodies, and sexual health. This article interrogates Viagra-related representations posted on YouTube and analyzes sexuopharmaceuticals as a set of intertextualities that create space for both normative discourses and social critiques. Three analytic themes illustrate how Viagra-related YouTube videos (1) reinforce a regime of self-care within a wider context of individualized responsibility for one's sexual health, (2) highlight the values attached to the pharmasexed gendered body for men and women in the age of Viagra, and (3) provide disruptions, in the form of criticism, to the assumption that healthy bodies and relationships need pharmasexual enhancement. The article concludes by suggesting that social networking sites such as YouTube are managed public spaces through which one can interrogate the intertextualities that link discourses related to bodies and sexual health to the virtual and material spaces of everyday life.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

Exploring the vertical: science and sociality in the field among cavers in Venezuela

Recent scholarship on vertical geographies has lead to a critical reexamination of the relationship between space and power. In this paper, I develop a vertical geographies approach in an unexplored context and with a less tested method: that of cave explorers and scientists in the field in Venezuela, from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographic analysis of exploration in practice, viewed in relation to a multi-dimensional environment and the social dynamics, bodies, and technologies involved in traversing it, illustrates the ways vertical geographies are constructed and experienced. For the Venezuelan Speleological Society, a group dedicated to cave exploration and science since 1967, examining these geographies highlights culturally specific ways the tension between sports and science in speleology play out and how new members are socialized in the field. Specifically, attention to verticality highlights the role that age, masculinist heroics, and other embodied dimensions play in the construction of speleological geographies. More broadly, an ethnographic focus on exploration, with humans probing the earth's sinuous contours, guards against thinking of verticality abstractly—doing so risks simplifying and even misrepresenting multi-dimensional and processual engagements among humans, their technologies, and the environment.